The Sociology Project 2.0 has been written collaboratively by members of the NYU Sociology Department, ensuring that each chapter has been prepared by faculty members who teach and perform research in the particular subfield being discussed. Learn more about how each of The Sociology Project’s authors discovered her own sociological imagination below.

Richard Arum
Although I grew up in the suburbs of New York, I had an unusual background as my father was a sports promoter, and cultural icons and civil rights heroes such as Muhammad Ali spent time in our home. This early personal exposure shaped who I was and the choices I made as an adult. In the years following, I received a teaching certificate from Harvard University and subsequently worked as a teacher in a segregated public high school in Oakland, California. In that institutional setting, in order to make sense of the dysfunction of the school as an organization as well as the impact that the school was having on the lives of the students, I increasingly was drawn to asking sociological questions of the world. To move beyond simply asking these questions, I enrolled at the University of California–Berkeley with the goal of developing sociological tools and skills to better understand the problems around schooling in America. For me, developing a sociological imagination was an attempt to develop a set of analytical competencies to participate actively in policy discussions that could substantively improve the outcomes of youth.

Vivek Chibber
I came to sociology largely by accident. When I graduated from college, I knew I wanted to go to graduate school to study the political economy of capitalism – how it works, where it come from, and why people put up with it. But issues like these were rapidly receding from the research agenda of most disciplines. I had no particular interest in sociology. But as it happened, there was a good group of people at the University of Wisconsin sociology department who focused on just this subject. So I decided to do my PhD there, mainly because I thought I would get what I wanted – and become a sociologist in the process. My research interests are still largely the same, though with a focus on the developing world.

Troy Duster
The first 16 years of my life were spent in a low-income, racially segregated neighborhood on Chicago’s near South Side. It was a period in the United States in which racial segregation was taken for granted at barbershops, bowling alleys, swimming pools, and many public accommodations – even in the urban North. Frank Wong, the son of a Chinese restaurant owner in the area, was the only student in my high school who was not African American. Then, at age 17, I crossed town to attend Northwestern University, where I was one of only seven African Americans on a campus of over 7,000 whites. Anthropologists call it “culture shock” when the deep assumptions about what is normal are disrupted by new circumstances, whether by travel to a foreign country or by being thrust into an unfamiliar social world where previously held assumptions have little or no relevance. For me, sociology provided a handle on my situation, a way to understand why and how people explain away their privilege as if it were an individual accomplishment. I watched with the astonishment of the outsider how people from wealthy families concluded unreflectively that the way the world was ordered was natural and right. Of course, many poor people also see the way the world is organized as normal, so that was no surprise. But it was the attempt to explain the “why” that caught my attention, intrigued and stoked my intellectual curiosity, and brought me into sociology.

Paula England
My mother didn’t have enough money to go to college, and never considered a career after she married at age 19 and became a stay-at-home mom to four children. Later, when I was grown, she claimed she was lucky to be able to stay at home with her kids. But she also talked about feeling underappreciated by my dad. Gender inequalities often made her feel “less than.” Dad had the education, not her, and she often felt that principals, doctors, and community leaders didn’t respect “just a housewife,” even though she saw importance in what she was doing. I became fascinated by sociology, seeing it as a way to understand social causes of human suffering. I wondered how much my mother’s suffering would have been lessened had the gender regime been different. My early research focused on why some occupations are filled mostly with men and others mostly with women, why women earn less than men, and why mothers earn less than women without children. These topics interested me because I wanted to understand the social forces that hold women back. Later, I began to study the increasing trend toward young couples having unplanned pregnancies followed by births outside of marriage. Currently, I’m conducting a study of relationships and sex among college students, trying to understand how the sexual revolution intersects with the gender revolution.

Thomas Ertman
As an undergraduate I was passionate about both history and philosophy, but as graduation drew nearer, I wasn’t sure how these interests could be reconciled. It was a history professor who suggested I might consider studying sociology because the field encompasses both social theory and historical sociology. I took his advice and quickly discovered that there is hardly an area of life, past or present, to which the sociological imagination cannot fruitfully apply itself. I myself have written and taught on the emergence of the state in the West; democracy and dictatorship in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe; the development of opera and ballet as art forms; and music, literature, and painting in France and Germany. The common thread that unites this research has been the inspiration I have derived from the classical social theorists, especially Max Weber. Although he died nearly a century ago, his writings remain as relevant as ever to our world.

Kathleen Gerson
My sociological imagination began when I realized I was part of – yet stood apart from – the world around me. Born in the deep South, I grew up in a community where traditional homes and worldviews were the norm. Yet my own family was headed by a single mother strongly committed to social justice. As I developed a sense of being both an insider and an outsider, I learned to see the world from several vantage points at once. A move to San Francisco during adolescence deepened my questioning of what others took for granted. By the time I reached college, these experiences had attuned me to the power of social contexts. Sociology offered a place to address the big issues facing contemporary societies. With that aim in mind, my research focuses on gender, work, and family life, with an eye to understanding the new work and family pathways emerging in the United States and other postindustrial societies. Although I rely on a range of methods, I specialize in qualitative interviewing. My goal is to uncover how personal biographies intersect with social institutions to bring about social change. I have written books and articles that offer innovative frameworks for explaining the revolution in gender, work, and family patterns, and my current research focuses on the new worlds of work and care, where occupational paths and personal relationships are increasingly uncertain.

Jeff Goodwin
I grew up at a time when the U.S. government was trying hard to destroy domestic social movements, especially the black power and the anti—Vietnam War movement, as well as revolutions overseas, particularly in Cuba, Vietnam, and Chile. I remember vividly the killing of students at Kent State University who were protesting the invasion of Cambodia, something that was pretty scary for a young kid. I was also scared and anxious when my older brother was drafted into the military, but fortunately he was not sent to Vietnam. All this made me interested in why people protest and rebel, sometimes violently, and why governments sometimes use violence against their opponents. I came to understand how the sociological imagination, which C. Wright Mills described – the capacity, that is, to see how seemingly personal grievances are in fact linked to social structures and shared with others – is a prerequisite of political protest. While I was studying rebels in college and graduate school at Harvard, I also joined the ranks of movements that were trying to stop the U.S. government from supporting brutal armies in Central America and the racist government in South Africa. I have been studying social movements (and occasionally participating in them) as well as revolutions ever since.

Lynne Haney
Sometimes I think I was born with a sociological imagination – although that would be thoroughly unsociological of me to say. I grew up in the California Bay Area in the 1970s, when the feminist, civil rights, and gay-rights movements were at their peak – and all kinds of identities and relationships were being questioned. As a result, thinking sociologically seemed to be in the air; everyone was asking the big questions about why the world was the way it was. But then the context changed and morphed into the 1980s of Ronald Reagan and social conservatism (as well as bad hair and bad fashion). And much of the social and cultural questioning I grew up with began to wane as more rigid and limiting assumptions about the world and our places within it became acceptable. This shift left me wondering how people come to accept or reject received wisdom: Was it just a matter of who had the power and resources to impress their version of reality on others? Or was there some way to discern fact from fiction, myth from reality? It was around this time that I discovered social science research. As a young college student, sociology appealed to me because it seemed to offer the empirical tools to resolve many political and social conflicts. It offered the possibility that not everything was relative, a matter of opinion, or open to ideological debate. In this way, although I’ve had a sociological imagination for a long time, it was not until I learned to conduct social research that I could use my imagination productively – as a way of teaching myself and others how to learn from and be surprised by the social world.

Ruth Horowitz
As I reflect on my experiences as a teenager living abroad, first in Buenos Aires, Argentina, then in a small French village, and later in a tiny Mexican village, I can understand why I became a sociologist. In Buenos Aires I saw heavy gates around large homes clearly meant to keep strangers out, but the walls around the poor neighborhoods appeared designed to keep people in. Why, I wondered, did the walls have different meanings and why were the poor treated differently? The French teens seemed different than me. Was it because they were French and I American, they lived in a small town and I was from Boston, or their parents owned a butcher shop or worked in factories and my father was a professor, I wondered? As an undergraduate I decided to become a sociologist and researcher when I tried to analyze what I had seen in the Mexican Village where I lived and found we had violated many social norms. I saw that research would help my understanding and more research was necessary to truly understand the lives of others. With new experiences as a public member on medical licensing and disciplinary boards, my research evolved from the study of urban ethnic communities, gangs, and teen mothers to the regulation of physicians.

Guillermina Jasso
I was born half a mile from the border with Mexico in the old Mercy Hospital that faced Jarvis Plaza in Laredo, Texas. But I did not know that my parents were “immigrants.” In the Texas textbooks, “immigrants” were Southern and Eastern Europeans who lived in crowded tenements and had bad habits. Every year Martin High School, the only public high school, graduated a class of securely anti-immigrant students, the vast majority of whose parents or grandparents had come from Mexico. No one had told these Shakespeare-quoting, Bach-playing, Rodgers and Hammerstein-whistling, Lerner and Loewe-dancing boys and girls that we, too, threatened the American way of life. I grew up passionate to understand the way the world works. In time I got a PhD, and began studying fairness, theoretically with probability distributions, empirically with vignettes. One day in 1977, I got a call from the Commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Would I join his staff and advise him on the social science underlying immigration issues? “But I don’t know anything about immigration,” I said. “You know more than you think you know,” he said quietly, “and you can learn the rest.” And that is how I started studying immigration. And how I learned that my parents were immigrants and that I was born in the fabled second generation.

Jennifer Jennings
I grew up in suburban New Jersey and, after graduating from college, taught high school English and social studies in urban public high schools. My students were overwhelmingly poor, and I recognized that many of their problems succeeding in school stemmed from health issues they faced on a day-to-day basis. Though my research in graduate school initially focused on education, the insight I had as a teacher led me back to studying health and education disparities. My current work in this area focuses on the effects of one’s state of birth on his or her mortality and morbidity as an adult, as well as how systems that measure hospitals based on their patients’ outcomes affect the quality of care that patients receive.

Colin Jerolmack
As a beginning graduate student interested in city life, I spent a lot of time wandering around the streets of New York’s Greenwich Village. I was particularly drawn to neighborhood parks that were undergoing renovations because the process of deciding how to redesign the parks afforded a window into how community members used, imagined, and complained about their public spaces. I was surprised to learn that many civic associations and park users complained about pigeons, whose feces made park benches unusable and posed a potential disease threat. However, in observing public behavior I saw that pigeon feeding was a popular activity among park visitors. I realized that urban wildlife impacted how people interpreted and experienced their public spaces, for better and for worse. Over time, I became fascinated by the ways that the natural environment shapes city life, and I came to see that people’s responses to urban wildlife revealed how they draw boundaries between environment and society. Because of the humble pigeon, I developed a passion for environmental sociology without even leaving the metropolis.

Eric Klinenberg
I grew up in the center of Chicago, and my interest in the sociology of culture and cities grew out of my experiences there. I lived in a bohemian but rapidly gentrifying neighborhood called Old Town, a place that was long famous for its vibrant street life and for its blues clubs, jazz bars, cafés, and counterculture scenes. Chicago is a segregated city, and Old Town is wedged between two of the city’s most affluent areas, the Gold Coast and Lincoln Park, and Cabrini Green, a housing project (recently demolished) where most of the residents were African American and poor. I was always puzzled by this arrangement, and trying to understand it as a child was the beginning of my sociology career. My research examines cities, culture, climate, and communications. My first book, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, explores two questions. Why did so many people die during a short heat spell in 1995? And why was this disastrous event so easy to deny, overlook, and forget? My second book, Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America’s Media, examines how media consolidation has affected newspapers, radio stations, television news, and the Internet and tracks the emergence of the global media reform movement. My latest book, Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone, analyzes the incredible social experiment in solo living that began in the 1950s and is now ubiquitous in developed nations throughout the world.

Steven Lukes
My first book was about the life and ideas of Emile Durkheim, one of the founders of the sociological tradition, whose classic works raise large questions about how to understand what “social” means and why the explanations typical of economics and psychology, at the level of individuals and their interactions, will always be inadequate. They also, however, leave other questions unaddressed: They largely neglect power relations, class, and other social conflicts within societies. My subsequent work has addressed both sets of questions, with books on individualism, on power, and on Marxism. I started to think sociologically about morals when still an undergraduate student: Where our moral judgments come from, if not from our social context, and why they should apply beyond it, are questions I continue to pursue. And reading Durkheim’s great book on religion led me to ask to what extent our religious, scientific, and even logical thought is socially shaped.

Jeff Manza
Growing up in the college town of Berkeley, CA, my family was neither elite (my parents worked for the local university, but not as professors) nor unprivileged. I experienced the differences between these worlds, and in particular the inequalities they represented, as an endlessly fascinating puzzle. I was also always interested in politics and occasionally participated in political protests and movements. My intellectual interest in sociology began to develop while I was an undergraduate student because it seemed to provide a way of connecting my emerging concerns about inequality and injustice with a set of theories and ways of studying how those inequalities persist. Since then, I have been exploring how social inequalities influence political life. More recently I have become interested in how public opinion does or does not shape government policies and how and when public attitudes can be manipulated or misused by political elites. I hope that my work can contribute, in some small way, to making American democracy more representative and egalitarian than it currently is.

Gerald Marwell
My mother said I was always an “oppositional” child. I grew up in a religious home and went to parochial school, but I never understood what these old stories had to do with me or my world. And I was angry that my friends were out playing ball while I was stuck listening to old men telling me to sit still. I went to MIT to become an engineer, but I discovered interests in economics and psychology instead. I disagreed with the oversimplified psychology that underlies economics and hoped that sociology, the most general of the social sciences, might let me pursue both of my interests. And I fell in love: with all of sociology, and all of social science. Where else can you spend your life thinking about the human condition and get paid for it? Most of my work has been on offering alternatives to economic theories of “collective action,” or cooperation, particularly in social movements. Religion is not so different from social movements, in that it requires commitment and faith. So, in my late 60s I finally took up the question that has puzzled me my entire life – why are so many people religious? Why is religion so important in the world?

Harvey Molotch
I came to sociology through a college professor of philosophy who thought that a book by a sociologist, C. Wright Mills, called The Sociological Imagination, contained profound social and ethical lessons. I read Mills and absorbed the idea that meaningful community cannot happen when some people have so little power compared to others. The solution, as Mills advocates, is for people to link up with others to see their problems as common ones, caused by the same types of external forces. Particularly in regard to cities (which became a focus of my own research), I learned how business groups, mostly based in real estate, dominate urban agendas and promote projects regardless of their social and environmental impacts; “growth machines,” I called them. I came to wonder why so many people went along even when the results were so counter to their own interests. This took me to studies of news media. Most recently, I have been writing about objects – ordinary things like toasters and toilets and less ordinary things like airport security scanners – to learn their social origins and effects on people’s lives.

Ann Morning
My sociological imagination developed from my experiences growing up with people from many different cultural backgrounds. I was raised in Harlem, the famous African American neighborhood in New York City. But even though my home community was very ethnically homogeneous at the time (it isn’t anymore), I was exposed every day to people from all over the globe because I studied at the United Nations International School. The contrast between those two worlds really got me curious about how social environments shape our thinking. As a sociologist today, my research focuses precisely on how people from different social backgrounds think differently about some of the things that seem most natural or objective to us, like racial identities or scientific knowledge. My research connecting these areas was recently published in my first book, The Nature of Race: How Scientists Think and Teach about Human Difference (Morning 2011).

Caroline H. Persell
While I was in graduate school at Columbia University, James Coleman and others published a major study showing that schools made little difference in the achievement of students because the variations within individual schools was almost as great as the variations between schools. This rocked the scholarly world and got me thinking about whether it captured all of the colors in the educational spectrum. In my visits to many inner-city schools, I had seen students and teachers with lots of energy, ambition, and intelligence working hard to do the best they could in the underresourced conditions they were in. At the same time, I knew that other types of schools, like private boarding schools, were not included in the Coleman study, and wondered how education differed for students at such schools. A question of enduring interest to sociologists is how social and economic advantages are transferred from one generation to the next in a society that purports to frown on inherited privilege. Peter Cookson and I addressed this question by studying elite boarding schools in the United States and England and found out that they perpetuate intergenerational inequality not just with money but through a range of school practices.

Patrick Sharkey
My research focuses on the way that places – meaning the environments surrounding individuals, from the residential block to the town or city in which they live – affect the life chances of individuals and groups in the United States. Much of my work looks at multiple generations of American families and analyzes the degree of inequality in families’ neighborhood environments over long periods of time and the consequences of living in persistently poor or disadvantaged neighborhood environments over multiple generations. A more recent strand of my research focuses more closely on the specific ways that living in a poor neighborhood may affect the day-to-day lives of children, with particular attention paid to the way that violence and other stressors in children’s environments “get into the minds” of children to affect their behavior, their health, and their academic performance.

Florencia Torche
I grew up in Chile observing social inequality from a very early age. My research focuses on the way in which inequality is reproduced across generations, that is how advantages and disadvantages are transmitted from parents to children. In particular, I am interested in education and analyze the extent to which education both contributes to the transmission of inequality across generations and promotes opportunity. Much of my work uses an international comparative perspective in an attempt to understand how variation across nations – in terms of levels of economic development, the educational system, and the welfare state – affects patterns of inequality. My most recent research examines the extent to which social background has profound effects on early life – starting as early as in the prenatal period – including how these early patterns have consequences for an individual’s health, developmental, and socioeconomic outcomes later in life.

Lawrence L. Wu
I was born in New York City but mostly grew up in Los Angeles, in the northwest corner of the San Fernando Valley in a city called Chatsworth. As a sociologist, my areas of specialization are in social demography, particularly in the social demography of the family, meaning that I have written on fertility (and especially nonmarital fertility), cohabitation, marriage, and divorce. Many social demographers use big data sets in their research, and I am no different, so I’m more than a bit of a numbers geek. What fascinates me the most as a social scientist is the fact that so much of our social world has changed so very quickly and what this means, in turn, for each of us as individuals living in an ever-changing world. This also means that as a numbers geek, one of my other areas of specialization is in statistical methods for studying change, both change historically and change as people’s lives unfold from birth through adolescence and into adulthood.

I. Brief Table of Contents

1. The Sociological Imagination
2. Social Theory
3. Studying the Social World
4. Social Interaction
5. Social Structure
6. Culture, Media, and Communication
7. Power and Politics
8. Markets, Organizations, and Work
9. Cities and Communities
10. Social Stratification, Inequality, and Poverty
11. Race and Ethnicity
12. Gender and Sexuality
13. Families and Family Life
14. Sociology of Religion
15. Education
16. Health and Medicine
17. Crime, Deviance, and Social Control
18. Social Movements and Revolutions
19. Environmental Sociology
20. Population
21. Immigration
22. Globalization

II. Comprehensive Table of Contents

1. The Sociological Imagination
by Jeff Manza, Lynne Haney, and Richard Arum
1.1: What Is the Sociological Imagination, and Why Is It Worth Acquiring?
1.2: What Are Social Contexts, and Why Do They Matter?
Shared Writing: Your Sociological Imagination
1.3: Where Did Sociology Come From, and How Is It Different from the Other Social Sciences?
Conclusion: Looking Ahead
Chapter 1 Quiz: The Sociological Imagination

2. Social Theory
by Jeff Manza, Thomas Ertman, Lynne Haney, and Steven Lukes
2.1: What is Social Theory?
2.2: How Did the Early Social Theorists Make Sense of the World?
2.3: What Innovations in Social Theory Emerged in the Mid-Twentieth Century?
2.4: How Has a New Generation of Social Theory Evolved?
Shared Writing: Your Sociological Imagination
Conclusion: Social Theory and the Sociological Imagination
Chapter 2 Quiz: Social Theory

3. Studying the Social World
by Lynne Haney
3.1: Where Do Sociological Questions Come From?
3.2: What Is the Best Method to Research a Sociological Question?
Shared Writing: Your Sociological Imagination
3.3: What Challenges Do Sociologists Face When Collecting Data?
3.4: How Do Sociologists Make Sense of Their Findings?
Conclusion: Thinking Critically about Research
Chapter 3 Quiz: Studying the Social World

4. Social Interaction
by Harvey Molotch
4.1: How Do We Develop a Sense of Self?
4.2: How Do We Make Sense of Our Worlds?
Shared Writing: Your Sociological Imagination
4.3: What Challenges Do We Face as We Move from One Social Context to Another?
Conclusion: What We Know and What We Don't Know
Chapter 4 Quiz: Social Interaction

5. Social Structure
by Jeff Manza
5.1: What Is Social Structure?
5.2: How Do Roles and Social Hierarchies Shape Our Life Chances?
5.3: How Do Norms and Institutions Influence Social Life?
Shared Writing: Your Sociological Imagination
5.4: How Do Social Structures Influence Our Daily Lives and Social Interactions?
5.5: Why Are Social Structures Slow to Change?
Conclusion
Chapter 5 Quiz: Social Structure

6. Culture, Media, and Communication
by Eric Klinenberg
6.1: What Is Culture?
6.2: How Does Culture Shape Our Collective Identity?
6.3: How Do Our Cultural Practices Relate to Class and Status?
6.4 Who Produces Culture, and Why?
Shared Writing: Your Sociological Imagination
6.5: What Is the Relationship between Media and Democracy?
Conclusion
Chapter 6 Quiz: Culture, Media, and Communication

7. Power and Politics
by Steven Lukes and Jeff Manza
7.1: What Are the Distinct Forms of Power?
7.2: What Is the State, and How Does It Distribute Power in a Society?
7.3: Who Has Power in the United States Today?
Conclusion
Chapter 7 Quiz: Power and Politics

8. Markets, Organizations, and Work
by Richard Arum and Jeff Manza
8.1: How Do Social Factors Impact Markets?
8.2: Why Are Organizations Important for Social and Economic Life?
8.3: What Is the Relationship between Organizations and Their External Environment?
8.4: How Is Work Inside Organizations Structured?
8.5: How Do We Measure Work Satisfaction?
Conclusion: Markets, Organizations, and Work in the Twenty-First Century
Chapter 8 Quiz: Markets, Organizations, and Work

9. Cities and Communities
by Patrick Sharkey
9.1: What Draws People to Cities?
Shared Writing: Your Sociological Imagination
9.2: How Do Neighborhoods Form and Change?
9.3: How Do Cities Influence Who We Are, Who Our Friends Are, and How We Live?
9.4: Why Are So Many Social Problems Found in Cities?
9.5: How Will Cities Change in an Increasingly Connected World?
Conclusion: Our Urban Future
Chapter 9 Quiz: Cities and Communities

10. Social Stratification, Inequality, and Poverty
by Florencia Torche, Richard Arum, and Jeff Manza
10.1: What Is Inequality?
10.2: Why Is America So Unequal?
10.3: Do We All Have an Equal Opportunity to Succeed in Life?
10.4: How Much Poverty Exists in the United States and around the World?
Shared Writing: Your Sociological Imagination
Conclusion: Should We Be Concerned about Excessive Inequality?
Chapter 10 Quiz: Social Stratification, Inequality, and Poverty

11. Race and Ethnicity
by Ann Morning
11.1: What Is the Difference between Race and Ethnicity?
11.2: Is Race Real?
11.3: What Is Racism?
11.4: Do Race and Ethnicity Matter Anymore?
11.5: How Are Race and Ethnicity Changing in the Twenty-First Century?
Shared Writing: Your Sociological Imagination
Conclusion: Developing a Sociological Imagination on Race and Ethnicity
Chapter 11 Quiz: Race and Ethnicity

12. Gender and Sexuality
by Paula England
12.1: Where Do Gender Differences Come From?
12.2: How Have the Lives of Women and Men Changed in the Last 50 Years?
12.3: How Are Our Sex Lives Shaped by Biology and Society?
12.4: How Has Sexual Behavior Changed in the Last 50 Years?
Conclusion: The Puzzle of Gender Inequality
Chapter 12 Quiz: Gender and Sexuality

13. Families and Family Life
by Kathleen Gerson
13.1: What Is a Family?
13.2: Why Are Families Changing?
Shared Writing: Your Sociological Imagination
13.3: What Challenges Do We Face as We Develop Relationships and Balance Family and Work?
13.4: What Is It Like to Grow Up in a Twenty-First-Century Family?
13.5: What Social Policies around the World Best Support Changing Families?
Conclusion: The Future of Families
Chapter 13 Quiz: Families and Family Life

14. Sociology of Religion
by Gerald Marwell
14.1: What Is Religion, and What Are Its Functions?
14.2: How Does Social Structure Impact Religious Choice?
14.3: Why Are Some People More Religious than Others?
14.4: Why Do People Kill Each Other in the Name of Religion?
14.5: What Is the Future of Religion?
Shared Writing: Your Sociological Imagination
Conclusion
Chapter 14 Quiz: Sociology of Religion

15. Education
by Caroline H. Persell with Dirk Witteveen
15.1: Why Is Formal Education Universal?
15.2: How Is Education Related to Important Life Outcomes?
15.3: Is Education Equally Available to All?
15.4: How Do Educational Systems Differ?
Shared Writing: Your Sociological Imagination
Conclusion: The Future of Education in a Global Economy
Chapter 15 Quiz: Education

16. Health and Medicine
by Ruth Horowitz and Jennifer Jennings, with Owen Whooley
16.1: How Do Social Contexts Affect Health?
16.2: Who Gets Sick, and Why?
16.3: How Did Modern Medicine Emerge?
16.4: How Does Physician/Patient Interaction Affect Health and Illness?
16.5: Why Is Healthcare in America More Expensive Than in Other Countries?
Shared Writing: Your Sociological Imagination
Conclusion
Chapter 16 Quiz: Health and Medicine

17. Crime, Deviance, and Social Control
by Troy Duster and Jeff Manza
17.1: What Is Deviance?
17.2: How Is Morality Defined and Regulated?
17.3: Who Defines Deviance?
17.4: How Is Social Control Maintained?
Conclusion: Deviance and the Sociological Imagination
Chapter 17 Quiz: Crime, Deviance, and Social Control

18. Social Movements and Revolutions
by Jeff Goodwin
18.1: What Are Social Movements?
18.2: Why Do Movements Emerge, and Who Joins Them?
18.3: What Do Movements Accomplish?
18.4: What Are Revolutions, and Why Do They Occur?
Conclusion: The Future of Movements and Revolutions
Chapter 18 Quiz: Social Movements and Revolutions

19. Environmental Sociology
by Colin Jerolmack
19.1: How Does Social Life Relate to the Natural Environment?
19.2: How Has Human Activity Harmed the Environment?
Shared Writing: Your Sociological Imagination
19.3: How Do Environmental Factors Impact Inequality?
19.4: How Can We Create More Sustainable Societies?
Conclusion: Linking Environmental and Social Facts
Chapter 19 Quiz: Environmental Sociology

20. Population
by Lawrence L. Wu
20.1: Why Study Population?
20.2: How Do Populations Change over Time?
20.3: What Factors Influence Fertility?
20.4: How Are Trends in Aging and Mortality Emerging As Critical Issues in Many Societies?
Conclusion
Chapter 20 Quiz: Population

21. Immigration
by Guillermina Jasso
21.1: What Is Immigration, and How Do Governments Regulate It?
21.2: What Is the History of Immigration in the United States?
21.3: Why Do People Move?
21.4: How Do Immigrants Fare in Their New Environments?
21.5: What Are the Consequences of Immigration?
Conclusion: Immigration and the Future
Chapter 21 Quiz: Immigration

22. Globalization
by Vivek Chibber
22.1: What Is Globalization?
22.2: How Far-Reaching Is Globalization?
22.3: What Drives Globalization?
22.4: What Are the Benefits and Drawbacks of Globalization?
Conclusion: Globalization in Retrospect and Prospect
Chapter 22 Quiz: Globalization

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